2013-10-20

Tomorrow is election day in Edmonton, and while polls seem to indicate a majority of Edmontonians are actually interested in voting for Don Iveson the Coward, the only poll that matters is the one on October 21st.

I will introduce a new program called “Council’s 2%,” a goal for Council to work with city staff year-round to find $20 million in value annually. It’s incentive to continuously innovate and embrace ideas —such as switching to LED streetlights or smart bus passes — that improve performance at a lower cost. This should yield approximately $80 million over the next four term that we can invest in new infrastructure and maintenance.

One of the hardest things about watching people endorsing idiotic far-left policies today is realizing how few of the lessons from Yes, Minister were ever actually learned. A program vowing to "reduce expenses by $20 million" will probably burn though close to $600,000 before unveiling $1.3 million in savings...over a decade...assuming every hair-brained back-of-the-envelope assumption holds water. We've been seeing this for decades kids, Iveson's just peddling you the same old snake oil Don Getty convinced your pappy to buy.

But don't just turn to your father's generation, your great-grandfather was snookered once by this sort of salesman too.

I believe we must also look toward the future and begin to phase away our city’s over-reliance on property taxes. Property taxes are regressive; they don’t grow directly with our economy and sometimes they even punish those on fixed incomes and people who are unexpectedly unemployed. We need new and fairer ways to charge Edmontonians for the services that local government provides.

Of all the reasons to get pissed off at property taxes, talking about them being "regressive" is the biggest yawn-fest of all. The real problem with property taxes, of course, is that they aren't regressive enough. As a result, the number of people who pay significant amounts of property tax (or worse, are even aware they are paying property taxes on the property they rent or otherwise utilize) are very small compared to the large masses of young hipsters and university leftists who vote for screwballs like Iveson or Mandel. This means that Iveson can promise these people the moon and count on their votes: while throwing away (mostly, one presumes, to Diotte) the group who actually has to pay for all this nonsense.

In the long term, we, and all Canadian cities, must evolve how local governments charge for important services and infrastructure.

Right now, cities are responsible for 60% of all public infrastructure in this country, while receiving only 8% of the total tax revenue.

The first thing that comes to mind is that Don Iveson the worthless coward, not happy with boosting your property tax bill by 256%, is hoping to get the chance to do the same to the other forms of tax that you pay the province and Ottawa as well! A socialist talking about tax hikes is nothing new, but how brazenly he makes it sound like there's all this free tax money waiting to be scooped up by his fellow idiots on city council astounds me. That money is already been misspent by the province and the feds asshole, they don't need your help misspending it on Boyle Street Coop.

Secondly, Yellowbelly presents a pretty brutal false dichotomy here: 60% of public infrastructure better not be requiring anywhere close to 8% of total public taxation, not when taxes are also stuck paying for your healthcare, your education, and a few dozen other things that I don't think various levels of government should be in, but Iveson the Coward does. Of the public infrastructure the City of Edmonton is responsible for, a good chunk of it is things like city parks which shouldn't be costing an arm and a leg to run (if it is, then lucky bastard has the first candidate for his 2% savings plan). As for the rest of that, it leads into my third point...

...Thirdly, whining about how much public infrastructure the City of Edmonton is responsible for would carry a lot more weight if it wasn't for the fact that the City of Edmonton, with socialist idiots like Mandel and Cowardly Don Iveson leading the charge, are wasting metric shit-tons of taxpayer money building infrastructure that the private sector should be forking over the tab for. From overpriced rec centres to ugly redesigns of art galleries to free hockey arenas for billionaires, the Mandel tenure has featured the money-grubbing little slumlord signing on council sycophants like Iveson to blow through hundreds of millions of dollars -- which would sure cover a lot of infrastructure upkeep -- building things either Edmontonians don't want or things that they do want but have been convinced it's the job of city council to pay for.

Any revenue source you can think of is better than property taxes. The ongoing City Charter discussions are a window of opportunity to raise this issue with the province. This is something I plan to work closely with the mayor of Calgary on.

Yippie. If elected mayor, socialist extremist Chickenshit will team up with the extremist socialist mayor of Calgary to convince the extremist socialist premier to give them more money. More money that this same premier has already shown she:a) has no problem wasting on her ownb) has a funny habit of promising but then never paying.

Diotte has been talking fairly consistently about wanting user fees to be the better medium by which city services are run, and it's important to note that unlike Iveson's scheme there's a great costing mechanism introduced that, while not an actual free market, simulates it a lot more than Iveson sneaking up to Red Redford for a bunch of quid pro quo.

So other than the ever-so-clever scheme of just begging other levels of government for more money, what does Iveson have up his cowardly sleeves? Well, not a whole lot. He's just going to find funding somewhere, somehow. As I said earlier, this was the nonsense touted by William Aberhart decades ago: there was a "new way" that just needed to be found, there was a way to overrule basic economics and have all the money in the world to build as many areanas as we have billionaires uninterested in running their wildly popular losing hockey teams without feeder money from taxation. You just have to elect me, and I'll find it, I promise.

For those who's grasp of history comes from public schools, I'll fill in the blanks for you: there was (and is) no magical funding for these sources. There is no "better way". There is government services, which hopefully are as few services as possible pared down to the absolute minimum in order to minimize the impact of their funding, which comes from taxation. By it's nature, taxation creates a system where the haves (the producers, in the Charles Adler sense of the term) are the ones putting in the money, while the takers (against, courtesy Adler) are...well, taking it out.

Don Iveson is a coward, a twit, and he's firmly on the side of the takers. In Aberhart's case, when the Supreme Court and the feds (and the King!) smacked down his ridiculous ideas, he still tried them out on a smaller scale: he wasted tax dollars in an economy that definitely didn't need any more inefficiencies popping up unexpectedly in expensive and ultimately counter-productive social welfare. His one enduring legacy is Alberta Treasury Branches, which only survived by basically becoming a private bank...but not before inefficiently messing with the economy a time or two in the following years. Why look at that, one even involved giving money to the owner of Edmonton's hockey team. Finally, the Manning Centre for Democracy had to ride to Aberhart's rescue: Preston's father Ernest ended up running the province in a way that marked a steep departure from the Aberhart "free tax money to the poor".

One hopes we don't need Preston or one of his sons to ride to the rescue and rid us of Don Iveson. And at least Bible Bill Aberhart never allied himself with the sick antihumanist lifestyle of faggots:

Mayor Mandel was a passionate supporter of LBGTQ communities and the Pride festival, and as mayor, I would continue in his footsteps. Whether it’s by participating in the Mayor’s Pride brunch or marshalling the Pride Parade, I would be there with bells on.

On Monday October 21st, you can strike a blow against the takers and keep Iveson out of the mayor's chair. Seeing how he's allied with actual takers (in the sodomistic sense), there's no shortage of reasons to vote against him.